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Conflict On Lebanon Front As Fighting Rages In Gaza
JERUSALEM, April 14 (News Agencies) - Israel faced the prospect of a new battle front on the border with Lebanon after a Hezbollah attack killed an Israeli soldier on Saturday while a fierce gunfight raged between Israel and the Palestinians triggered when army tanks launched a raid in the Gaza Strip.
The fighting erupted ahead of renewed efforts to quell almost seven months of blazing violence, with a further round of U.S.-hosted security talks between Israel and the Palestinians and a meeting between Israeli and Jordanian foreign ministers on Monday.
As Christians were celebrating Easter in Jerusalem, fierce firefight erupted in Rafah on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt on Saturday following an Israeli army raid, Palestinian security and medical sources said.
Israeli tanks shelled Palestinian shops in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip after the army bulldozed a Palestinian security position in the area, prompting a heavy exchange of fire between the army and Palestinians, witnesses said.
After five hours of fighting, medical sources reported 46 injured, five of them seriously, by bullets and shrapnel during the incident, which saw several hundred people involved in the confrontation, dozens of them armed.
Israeli bulldozers destroyed 16 houses along with 12 shops and the security post, witnesses and security sources said, adding that residents, because of the continuous fighting in the region, had already abandoned the houses.
"The military presence in the area provokes people and escalates the confrontation," a Palestinian security source told AFP.
Also, 24-year-old Mohammed Yassin Nassar, a member of the hardline Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas was killed in an explosion in Gaza City on Saturday, security and medical sources said. Another four people were wounded, two of them seriously.
Hamas official Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi called it "an assassination by the Israeli army".
But when questioned by AFP, the Israeli army did not claim responsibility, while Israeli public radio said the blast was caused by a "working accident".
Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, is violently opposed to the Middle East peace process and has carried out numerous deadly retaliatory attacks since the 1993 Oslo peace accords, including several during the latest Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
Meanwhile, Israel's Lebanese front re-ignited Saturday when an Israeli soldier was killed in an attack by the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement.
The region had been relatively quiet since February when a soldier was killed after an anti-tank missile was fired toward an army force near a military post at Shebaa Farms on the Israel-Lebanon border, an army statement said.
"It is a very dangerous escalatory trend on the part of Hezbollah," Sharon's spokesman Raanan Gissin told AFP, adding that Israel was "very concerned" about the attack.
"What Hezbollah is doing today by attacking Israel beyond the border is clearly a provocation," he said, adding that Israel's actions were self-defense.
The area is claimed by both Lebanon and Israel since the Jewish state ended its 22-year-occupation of its northern neighbor in May.
In November, Hezbollah killed an Israeli soldier in the same area, and the month before its commandos ambushed an Israeli patrol and abducted three Israeli soldiers.
The soldiers, and a fourth Israeli captured a few days later, were seized in a bid to arrange a swap for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel as "bargaining chips" for missing Israeli servicemen. Their fate is still unknown.
Saturday's events were likely to undermine recent current diplomatic efforts to put an end to the violence that has killed more than 470 people since last September, most of them Palestinian.
U.S. and Jordanian diplomats are preparing for visits to address the conflict, but U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged that bringing the sides back to the negotiating table would be "exceptionally difficult."
Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdel Ilah al-Khatib is due in Israel Monday, the first visit by a high-ranking Arab official since Sharon took office, while top U.S. Middle East diplomat Edward Walker is due to visit Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
But Powell said Friday it was "exceptionally difficult to even think about negotiations" on the final status of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Powell, speaking in Ireland on his way home from the Balkans, said he was "very concerned with the level of violence. I have the same concern I had five or six weeks ago."
Also, one person was seriously injured when two explosions went off on the same busy street in the Tel Aviv suburb of Kfar Sava on Saturday evening.
However, it was not yet clear whether the explosions were accidental or not.
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